Egypt’s Leader Uses Old Tricks to Defy New Demands

Egypt’s government has responded to the unrest primarily as a security issue, largely ignoring, or dismissing, the core demands of the protesters.

MONA EL-NAGGAR and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Political protests may be rocking Egypt with a new, nonideological force, but President Hosni Mubarak and his allies have not veered from a playbook they have followed through nearly three decades of one-party rule.

As always, the government has responded to the unrest primarily as a security issue, largely ignoring, or dismissing, the core demands of those who have taken to the street.

“My analysis is, the government will leave them until they reach a level of exhaustion,” said Abdel Moneim Said, a member of the president’s ruling party and the director of the government-owned newspaper and publishing house, Al Ahram.

The Egyptian leadership, long accustomed to an apolitical and largely apathetic public, remains convinced that Egypt is going through the sort of convulsion it has experienced — and survived — before.

The leaders see in the protest an experience similar to the events of 1977, when Anwar el-Sadat, then the president, announced plans to end subsidies of basic food items, setting off 36 hours of rioting across the country. They see a repeat of the threat the government faced from Islamic militants in the 1990s, which it violently suppressed. And so the leaders have fallen back on a familiar strategy, deploying security forces, blaming the Islamists and defining their critics as driven by economic, not political, concerns.

“I can’t think of anybody that I know that has any concern about the stability of the regime,” Mr. Said added. But the Egyptian playbook is not just calling for a strategy that runs on the fumes of history. Like the protesters, Mr. Mubarak and his allies appear to have learned lessons from Tunisia’s popular revolt.

The main one appears to be not to give an inch.

While Tunisia’s ousted president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, went on television and offered his now frequently mocked concession — “I understand you” — Mr. Mubarak has remained silent, leaving it to his proxies to try to calm the unrest. That may be because neither side in this fight has much room to maneuver.

The opposition does not have an available political path to change, other than protest. And Mr. Mubarak has little to offer because he has systematically eviscerated civil and political institutions, creating a system that allows change to come only through his party and his allies, political analysts here said.

The Mubarak administration is blind to this weakness, however, seeing itself as strong and having the support of the majority.

“Egypt’s system is not marginal or frail,” the interior minister, Habib al-Adli, told a Kuwaiti newspaper. “We are a big state, with an administration with popular support. The millions will decide the future of this nation, not demonstrations, even if numbered in the thousands.”

Loyalists, like Mr. Said of Ahram, remain committed to a view that sees the nation’s different constituencies as divided by ideology and demands, and therefore easily picked off with simple offerings like a pay raise or a cabinet shuffle. Change, the party line goes, will come slowly, and only from the inside.

So far, there is virtually no recognition, at least publicly, that Egypt has already changed, and that even if the protests are suppressed, they have demonstrated a convergence of agendas around core demands of political change, economic improvement and an end to corruption.

At a news conference in the offices of the ruling National Democratic Party on Thursday, the secretary general and a longtime ally of Mr. Mubarak, Safwat el-Sherif, struck a confident tone, saying that the party wanted to have a dialogue with the nation’s young people, but that in his view the critics had little standing.

“We are confident of our ability to listen,” he said. “The N.D.P. is ready for a dialogue with the public, youth and legal parties. But democracy has its rules and process. The minority does not force its will on the majority.”

The only nod to the anger in the streets was a rather vague announcement on the official MENA news service that Parliament would discuss at its Sunday session issues relevant to the poor, including subsidies and efforts to improve life in the shantytowns, where millions live without basic infrastructure. And they said they were willing to discuss ways to protect the country against swine flu.

The message was not well received.

“I hope, I hope this regime will have enough intelligence to engage in a negotiation process,” said Ghada Shahbandar, a human rights advocate who participated in the first day of demonstrations. “They have to give in to the people’s demands. They have to fight corruption. No. 1, they have to clean up their act.”

No one seems to think that the protests have ended, with many people predicting a large turnout after the Friday Prayer services, which regularly draw millions of men out to the mosques. The government has already taken a step to heading off a tumultuous Friday, with the Ministry of Religious Affairs issuing a statement saying that the “love of homeland is part of faith.”

It also continues to insist that those who protest are subject to arrest.

There seems to be little chance the two sides will reconcile anytime soon, in large part because they perceive events so differently.

Hossam Bahgat, a well-known human rights advocate who founded the Egyptian Initiative For Personal Rights, has spent days not only walking the streets with the protesters but also struggling to get legal aid for those who have been arrested and swept into detention camps without charges and without a trace. He said the days of unrest had surely delivered a message to the president and his allies.

“I think the most important significant message from yesterday is that the regime’s allegations that political reform is only the demand of an isolated urban elite is a myth,” Mr. Bahgat said. “Clearly reform and change are demands that go beyond Cairo and beyond the middle class.”

But that message does not seem to have gotten through. Mr. Said, once an independent academic and now one of the first voices the government press office turns to in order to promote the state view, conceded in an interview only that the protests demonstrated that there were problems that needed to be addressed. But the government appears to be sticking to its version of the “rope-a-dope” strategy Muhammad Ali used to defeat George Foreman in 1974. Mr. Ali spent round after round against the ropes as Mr. Foreman pounded himself into exhaustion.

And then Mr. Ali knocked him out.

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